Waller, Edmund

Waller, Edmund (1606–87). Poet. Waller mixed poetry and politics. Born in Buckinghamshire of a very wealthy family, he went to Eton and King's College, Cambridge. He was returned to Parliament for Ilchester in 1624 when he was no more than 17 and was in the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640. Related to both Hampden and Cromwell, he was outspoken in 1642 for negotiations with the king and acquired the reputation of a bold royalist. But when ‘Waller's plot’ to seize London for the king was unmasked in 1643, he made an abject apology and confession to Parliament, which saved his life while leaving his brother-in-law to be hanged. Waller paid a crippling fine, spent seven years in France, and then made his peace with Cromwell, on whom he wrote a famous panegyric. Nevertheless, he rescued his political career at the Restoration, served in Parliament 1661–79 and again in 1685, held office as a commissioner of trade and plantations, spoke frequently, and reminisced cheerfully. He seems to have had a genuine belief in religious toleration. Much of Waller's poetry was pleasant social verse, but occasionally he hit a deeper note with ‘Go, lovely rose’ and ‘Of the Last Verse in the Book’. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, devoted much space to Waller, praising his elegance and gaiety: ‘he is never pathetick and very rarely sublime.’

J. A. Cannon